A humanistic philosophy informed by system dynamics: why simple solutions often displace problems across time and systems rather than resolving them.
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Populism Without a Populist
Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
Nobody needs to control the machinery. Repeated communication changes what people notice, expect and respond to, gradually reshaping the culture and politics that emerge from those interactions.
How veterans’ services and the NDIS reveal the displacement of human need by billing, commercial expansion and institutional self-preservation.
AI citation failures reveal something larger than a technical flaw: a civilisation increasingly efficient at reproducing knowledge while losing track of how it became known.
Our existential crisis lies in this entanglement: the relations through which we could create different, better, futures keep being recruited into the continuation of the arrangements that restrict them.
The question is no longer whether writers use generative technology. It is what remains of the writer after the technology becomes indispensable.
We are building extraordinarily intelligent machines to solve a problem whose governing assumptions remain remarkably primitive.
We are building a world that needs to know more and more about us, just as being unknown becomes increasingly valuable.
How lawfare converts institutional status and financial power into pressure that silences criticism and makes public disagreement prohibitively expensive.
The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.
The cast changes. The relations keep coming back. Popular culture makes visible how complex adaptive systems persist through transformation.
